Continuing Husserlian Phenomenology[1]

Lester Embree

Phenomenology is a century-old planetary tradition initiated, and still chiefly influenced, by the investigations of Edmund Husserl. The future development of this tradition is best approached by characterizing some of the core Husserlian positions and methods that have stimulated further developments in so many different directions[2] (including traditions now seen as standing outside phenomenology per se[3]), and then by sketching how the work continued at the New School by Dorion Cairns, Aron Gurwitsch, and Alfred Schutz, who are the mature Husserl’s closest disciples, is not only true to Husserl’s own life-long project, but can still show ways for phenomenology to address continuing and emerging issues.
The present writer studied with Cairns and Gurwitsch during the 1960s and has published on their work as well as on that of Schutz, so the fact that the opportunity for the present essay comes from the Husserl Archive at the New School, where he was himself the secretary in 1968–69, is a particular delight for him.
There now exist over 125 phenomenological organizations across the planet. Besides the extensive continuing activity in North America and in Western Europe, there are recently established regional organizations in Central and Eastern Europe, in East Asia, and in Latin America. Moreover, a worldwide Organization of Phenomenological Organizations was founded in Prague in 2002 and has met for the second time in Lima in August 2005.
Space is not available to list all the archives, book series (especially posthumous editions like Husserliana), centers, graduate programs, journals, newsletters, and other support institutions for the planetary tradition. But it must be mentioned that phenomenology is a tendency not only in philosophy, but also in such disciplines as architecture, communicology, economics, film studies, geography, music, nursing, pedagogy, political science, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology.
Although phenomenology may still not be adequately appreciated in the former British Empire—the United States of America included—nevertheless it is by virtue of its long-term multidisciplinary spread across the planet, as well as its vast wealth of results, arguably the most significant non-positivistic intellectual tradition in the 20th Century. Given the rich heritage to date, then, how can it continue?

What, Briefly, Is Phenomenology?

The definition of phenomenology has often been discussed within the tradition. Space is available for very few remarks.    
To begin with, phenomenology can be contrasted with two other positions, notably representationalism and naturalism. While indirect experiencing via indications, depictions, and linguistic expressions is recognized in phenomenology, representationalism is rejected where perception, recollection, expectation, and the seeing of ideal objects are concerned. In these cases, no image is reflectively discernable between the mental process and its object. Then again, rather than being modeled in its metaphysics as well as epistemology on naturalistic science, phenomenology, be it mundane or transcendental, is fundamentally concerned with sociocultural life, something returned to below.
Phenomenology itself is better characterized as an approach than as a set of doctrines. The method is not straightforward, but reflective, and thus it thematizes things-as-encountered as well as encounterings of them (Husserl spoke of “noema” and “noeses”). Concrete encounterings include components of experiencing, believing, valuing, and willing in broad significations. Moreover, although many in non-Continental traditions may find it incomprehensible, the approach is not argumentative, but rather descriptive or interpretative, and thus more like comparative anatomy than theoretical physics. Far more can be said about the approach, such as how it is chiefly eidetic but also sometimes empirical and thus able to describe particular cultural phenomena, but this characterization of it as reflective and descriptive may suffice here.[4]

Have We Lost Our Way?

There is a strong and clear emphasis in Husserl and other major phenomenological figures on the species of research best called investigation, yet the vast majority of soi disant phenomenologists today engage instead in a species of research that some call philology and others call scholarship. The latter species includes editing, interpreting, reviewing, and translating, and its methods are no different from those used in scholarship on other traditions of philosophy and science. Scholarship is extremely valuable because the works of many are difficult to understand, but it is not an end in itself. It is essentially instrumental. Its purpose is to assist investigation, which is where phenomenology is phenomenology.
Yet during their lives, that vast majority of “phenomenologists” seem not to get beyond scholarship. Why? Perhaps it is easier and safer to produce texts that can be judged in relation to other texts than to stand behind the results of one’s own reflective analyses of some “things themselves.” Devoting oneself to scholarship is understandable early in a career, when much remains to be learned and it is important to communicate with non-phenomenological colleagues. Then, perhaps established research habits are difficult to transcend, especially if “everybody else” does just scholarship too.
However, such explanations do not excuse the failure to continue one’s tradition by pursuing actual investigations. Some, of course, say that what seems to be mere scholarship is actually phenomenology because they are constantly seeing the things themselves through the texts they are interpreting. If this is so, however, why are there so few objections to and corrections of the errors by predecessors, who certainly disagree in many respects, and why are there so few descriptions of new things? It is not as if there is nothing left for phenomenologists to investigate.

Some Exemplarism

The three teachers of the New School are exemplary for continuing phenomenology. They began from knowledge gained in part directly from their master, but even though they made valuable contributions to scholarship, it was not at all the focus of their efforts. Cairns prepared crucial translations, but fundamentally developed a critically revised account of intentionality on the basis of reflective observation in his famous New School lectures, copies of student notes from which have long and widely circulated;[5] Gurwitsch influentially wrote “The Last Work of Edmund Husserl,” but produced above all The Field of Consciousness; and Schutz published major critiques of Sartre and Scheler as well as Husserl on intersubjectivity, but more fundamentally created the phenomenological theory of the social sciences single-handedly. These were not accomplishments in scholarship on texts, but required genuine original investigation.
In this situation, it might help if some writings were sometimes shown by their footnotes, etc., to be entirely scholarship; others were shown to be purely investigative by lacking footnotes, quotations, and references to authorities other than the things themselves; and yet others could be seen to have a mixed structure, with the work of some others critically discussed in a first part and then the results of original investigation distinctly expressed in a second part. Most importantly, the obligation today of those well versed in the literature is to show through example how phenomenology is done and not just talked about. Delightfully, there are promising signs of late.[6]

What to Investigate?

The three teachers of the New School were also exemplary with respect to Husserl’s own research focus. Under the influence of Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink, and Ludwig Landgrebe, most phenomenology in Europe after World War II has a metaphysical emphasis, while the focus in what Husserl published in his lifetime was on Wissenschaftslehre, especially in the theory of logic and mathematics, but also in the theories of the naturalistic sciences and even to some extent in the theory of the Geisteswissenschaften. Along with the distinctive interests of Realistic, Existential, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology, the many volumes of Husserliana now available may obscure the conscious focus of Husserl’s considered opinions for some scholars.
But Cairns’s reflections on psychology will be published soon, Gurwitsch’s Phenomenology and the Theory of Science is widely known, and Schutz reflected on and/or taught about economics and political science and even linguistics, as well as sociology, in a phenomenological perspective during his twenty some years at the New School. Provided one come to know something about other disciplines, the phenomenological theory of science can be continued further.[7]
The cultural, formal, and naturalistic sciences and the technologies based on them cannot be ignored, not only because they are foundational for the modern world, but also because they are among humankind’s greatest achievements. Gurwitsch taught a course on the mathematization of nature that went beyond Husserl but still did not exhaust that topic, particularly where the use of mathematics in the cultural sciences is concerned. What about the good as well as bad influences of so-called technoscience on sociocultural life? The focus continued by the New Schoolers is not a species of scientism, but rather the ongoing development of a critique of science most clearly present in Husserl’s Krisis. Further work in this respect is needed now more than ever.
Interest in disciplines beyond philosophy has been continued by students of the New School’s golden age, e.g., Lester Embree on the cultural sciences, Maurice Natanson in relation to literature, Gilbert Null with respect to formal ontology, Osborne Wiggins with respect to psychiatry, and Richard Zaner in relation to the body and medicine. Robert Jordan does phenomenological ethics. And Fred Kersten has carried on the interest of his three teachers in method, also something relatively unusual for phenomenology in Europe after World War II.

A Fifth Stage?

But the recent expanding thematic scope of phenomenology is not confined to New School students. In fact, a fifth tendency and stage of the phenomenological tradition seems to have begun internationally in the 1990s, emerging, for example, with reflections on religion in France and on interculturality in Germany. The latter in particular stem from reflections by Husserl in the 1920s and the former revive a theme that was not only of interest to his disciples in that decade, but can now be seen, on the basis of his manuscripts, to be part of his ever growing interest in society and history.
Other restored or new areas for investigation within this fifth tendency include the body, dance, film, ecology, gender, interspeciality, and politics. Beginnings have been made regarding generational differences and social class. Efforts to recollect a century of work in aesthetics[8] as well as the phenomenological tradition in moral philosophy[9] are being made. In all these cases, there has been learning from the past—from Husserl to begin with—but new knowledge has been sought as well through reflective description with respect to encounterings and things-as-encountered.
In other words, although the exact method may vary, the fifth phenomenological stage and tendency is characterized both by a focus on investigation (rather than on scholarship) and by a breadth of vision that encompasses various novel lifeworldly themes and issues (rather than solely on traditional philosophical problems).

What to Call This New Stage?

In view of the concern with, for example, acquired attitudes of valuing and willing toward such things as ethnicity and gender that are sedimented in secondary passivity and thus part of the constitution of the sociocultural world, such a fifth stage might be called “cultural phenomenology.” But “lifeworldly phenomenology” might be an even better name because it alludes to well-known developments in phenomenological philosophy as well as in the other cultural disciplines.

Must it be Transcendental?

There might seem to be a problem concerning how the transcendental phenomenology might square with such a lifeworldly tendency also focal in the mature Husserl (this seems less a problem with the realistic, existential, and hermeneutical tendencies developed from his philosophy). The other cultural disciplines naturally remain in the natural attitude. Yet this would seem less of a problem than once thought, now that it is known that transcendental intersubjectivities as well as subjectivities for Husserl are embodied, gendered, social, historical, and otherwise cultural, and may even occur in nonhuman species, jellyfish included.[10]
The mature Husserl posited a parallelism between “mundane” and “transcendental” phenomenology. Again where New School phenomenology was concerned, Schutz always found the “constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude” sufficient for his philosophical purposes; Gurwitsch recognized this; and while Cairns never hesitated in his commitment to transcendental phenomenology, his lectures were deliberately kept in the perspective of a pure phenomenological psychology because that is easier to understand and provides the best preparation for transcendental epochē, reduction, and purification.
Whether phenomenological philosophy must ultimately be transcendental or can suffice as mundane in philosophy as well as science will no doubt continue to be productively discussed within the planetary and multidisciplinary tradition that Husserl inaugurated and continues chiefly to influence.

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[1] This essay is published at the following website as part of the project entitled The Future of Phenomenology: www.newschool.edu/gf/phil/husserl/Future/Part%20One/PartOneFrames/PartOne.html

[2] The major philosophical tendencies and stages can be termed Realistic Phenomenology, Constitutive Phenomenology, Existential Philosophy, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology; see Lester Embree et al., eds., Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997). Cf. Herbert Spiegelberg with Karl Schuhmann, The Phenomenological Movement, 3rd revised and enlarged edition (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982) and Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (New York: Routledge, 2000). The question of a fifth stage and tendency within the tradition will be considered below, but see my “The Continuation of Phenomenology: A Fifth Period?” The Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology (www.ipjp.org) 1 (April 2001) and Escritos de Filosofia, La Fenomenologia en America Latina (Universidad de San Buenaventura, Bogatá, 2000).

[3] Lester Embree, “Husserl as Trunk of the American Continental Tree,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 11 (2002), 177–90.

[4] Cf. Lester Embree, Análisis reflexivo. Una primera introducción a la investigación fenomenológica / Reflective Analysis. A First Introduction into Phenomenological Investigation, bilingual edition, trans. into Castellano by Luis Román Rabanaque (Morelia: Editorial Jitanjáfora, 2003).

[5] Lester Embree, Fred Kersten, and Richard Zaner are currently preparing a multivolume edition on the basis of Cairns’s lecture scripts and manuscripts.

[6] E.g., Thomas M. Seebohm, Hermeneutics: Method and Methodology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004).

[7] Interest by phenomenologists in cognitive science has followed from interest by cognitive scientists in phenomenology. But one can wonder if the phenomenologists in this case are seeking to continue phenomenology or are joining the naturalistic and explanatory psychology that is interested once more in mental life. In contrast, the major hermeneutical phenomenologists seem to have benefited from Greek philology but not to have become philologists, Merleau-Ponty drew on psychiatry and psychology but did not become a psychiatrist or psychologist, etc. Additionally, it can also be wondered if bridges built across the gap with analytic philosophy will carry more than one-way traffic.

[8] Cf. Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree, eds., Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics (forthcoming).

[9] Cf. John J. Drummond and Lester Embree, eds., Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002).

[10] For Husserl on jellyfish, see, e.g., Husserliana 14, 113ff., 135 n. 1, 175; for Husserl on seeing others as transcendental even if these others do not recognize themselves as having this status, see Husserliana 15, 113, 384 n. 1.